Archive for tag Kind Financial

California’s Major Media Focuses on Ali Simard, President West Coast office for Stern & Co.

Alison Simard, who does public relations and marketing work for KIND Financial at their Hollywood office. KIND Financial makes financial and tracking software for cannabis businesses.

BY BROOKE EDWARDS STAGG, Staff Writer, Orange County Register

Alison Simard has done public relations for 20 years, representing technology and finance clients as West Coast president for Stern & Co.

Three years ago, the Los Angeles resident was having dinner with David Dinenberg, a real estate broker and entrepreneur whose kids had become friends with her kids. Unsure how Simard would react, Dinenberg cautiously brought up his latest venture: KIND Financial, a company that would offer online payment systems for cannabis businesses and technology to track marijuana from seed to sale.

Simard had never worked with the marijuana industry, and she doesn’t personally partake. But she saw the need for helping businesses comply with federal banking regulations without ever touching the plant.

“I told him, ‘You’re brilliant,’” Simard, 45, recalled. “He was about to get the tiger by the tail.”

Initially, Simard offered Dinenberg marketing advice as a friend. He’d hired a PR specialist focused on getting word about KIND Financial products to industry publications such as High Times magazine. Simard encouraged him to target The New York Times and CNBC as he sought to build a professional, legitimate company.

Now she spends time each week at KIND Financial’s L.A. headquarters crafting story pitches and a strategy aimed at making Dinenberg a thought leader in the industry. In the past few months, as pot has become what she terms a “sexy” media topic, it’s become an easier sell.

She sleeps well at night, she said, with none of the qualms she’d have in representing a predatory lender or – as an animal rights activist – Sea World. Her firm’s other clients have also been receptive, she said, even asking how they can invest in the company that now counts TV personality Montel Williams among its board members.

“Almost all of our clients are finance and business people, and they follow the money,” Simard said. “At the end of the day, it’s business.”

About the pot market

Here are thoughts on the legal marijuana industry from veteran public relations specialist Alison Simard:

• "Understand, whether you are pro or against it personally, the change is here and the change is happening."

• "We are at the beginning of an industry, and it's very rare to be standing on the platform with the train coming in."

"I get phone calls from brand-name PE firms," David Dinenberg, chief executive of Kind Financial, whose firm provides financial services technology to the cannabis industry, said in an interview. "They're curious about the industry."

Watch Stern & Co. client David Dinenberg, CEO of Kind Financial on CNBC Closing Bell discuss legal cannabis deemed the fastest growing industry by ArcView research. Click below to watch this fast paced interview with a full panel of CNBC hosts and financial journalists asking David to explain the market and the barriers to entry and what Kind Financial will do to streamline the financial solutions for legal cannabis businesses trying to get started.

The marijuana business is exploding but there's one tiny catch: Many businesses can't get loans. Enter David Dinenberg.

Why I Started A Financial-Services Firm for Pot

Most of us chase the American dream, so we know the drill: Think up an idea, gather our thoughts into a business plan, put our tax returns in order, then it's off to a bank.

But for the hundreds of entrepreneurs chasing the dream in what has become what some are calling the fastest growing industry in America, there is a major roadblock. Medical marijuana is legal in 24 states and Washington DC and also recreationally legal in four of those as well. At least a dozen more states have laws on the books or are about to be signed into law.

But marijuana is not legal federally. Like heroin and LSD, marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 drug. Federally, marijuana is restricted in all forms — including medical marijuana research. So banks, which contend with interstate commerce, can't give a loan even in those 24 states. Same with Small Business Association (SBA) loans.

he bipartisan proposal in the Senate by Cory Booker (D-NJ), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) would not legalize medical marijuana in all 50 states. Rather, it would respect the states that set their own medical marijuana programs and prevent federal law enforcement from prosecuting patients, doctors and caregivers in those states.

So, for financing, even in the 24 states where it's legal, cannabis entrepreneurs either raise the initial start-up money from friends or family, or take the road show route or dig into their own pockets.

I, too, chase the legal cannabis dream. Without personal resources, I put together a business plan and pounded the pavement. Lucky for me, I found the rare investors who share my vision and provided a seed investment so I could start Kind Financial. Kind Financial is the first full-service financial solutions resource strictly for the cannabis industry.

For the past decade, we have been looking for an industry to evolve as global outsource renders as obsolete so many U.S. industries. Now we have a winner. Cannabis has already generated billions in revenue, hundreds of millions in tax generation, tens of thousands of jobs. And it's made in America. Cannabis could be — and should be — a macroeconomic solution for the United States. But when and if the U.S. removes cannabis from Schedule 1 is anyone's guess.

David Dinenberg is founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based Kind Financial, a financial-resource providing a financial solutions for the cannabis industry. A former real estate developer from Philadelphia who is no stranger to raising capital, he's using his skills to help companies in the legal cannabis industry that are being denied basic business services. David is building Kind Financial to be the "GE Capital" of the legal marijuana industry. Follow him on Twitter @daviddinenberg.